Volume 3 - Electric Scotland

PORTRKE. 369
dirk in the convivial board beside him ; a pacific feast,
which, by a figure of speech well known to grammarians,
was called the feast of knives. All other congregations
were attended by a rabble of boys, who used to collect to
see the sport ; as, in our degenerate days, they throng to
witness the milk and water issue of a boxing match. It
is still amusing to listen to the coolness with which they
talk of some of those adventures. When I was walking
with John Mac Intyre in Glen Tilt, on an occasion I for-
merly mentioned, and had asked the English name of
Alt na marag, I was informed that it was the Pudding
burn ; because it was there they had " let his puddings
out." Let his puddings out ! a matter, apparently, of as
much indifference, as if they had been stuflTed with oat-
meal and worn in his pocket. But to return to Portree,
for what the meeting met, I do not know ; but as no cause
of dissention arose naturally out of the case, one man
thought fit to draw the line that was to ascertain his own
grave; now, or hereafter, as it might happen ; a mode of
acquiring property not provided for by Grotius or Vattel.
This declaratory act was soon followed by similar ones on
the part of his neighbours ; and whether there were more
men than graves, that it was ground " on which the
numbers could not try the cause," or whether the situa-
tion of some of these eventual freeholds was more sunny,
or the grass which they produced more fresh than that
of others, so it was, that they went together by ears for
possession which would not have been long visionary in
the days of the Clymore and Skian. To have esta-
blished an incontrovertible right of seisin and occupation,
could have offered little consolation to the victor ; unless
indeed, glory, living, as the rhynies have it, in story, was
to compensate him for adding his own carcase to the keep
of more valuable dust, which he was thus ambitious of
enjoying in posthumous and eventual security. Nafions,
VUL. III. B B